Senior Software Development Manager, Amazon EC2
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) pioneered cloud computing, providing computing capacity on-demand and a feature set that has enabled our customers to build and scale novel products previously considered infeasible. But it’s still day one and there’s no shortage of challenges in front of us.
The Amazon Development Centre in South Africa is looking for an experienced technical leader to manage and grow a number of engineering teams. The Cape Town based Development Center plays a key role in building Amazon EC2.
Each day

one third of web surfers visit a site powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
our servers send or receive 1% of Internet traffic in North America
we add the equivalent server capacity that powered Amazon when it was a $2.76B enterpriseYour responsibilities as a Senior Manager will include owning the design, implementation, and operation of a number of large-scale distributed systems that are critical for the operation of Amazon EC2 and our customers’ businesses. You will own hiring and developing top manager and engineering talent, and you will work with technical and business leaders to set strategy, define the product, and make the hard, high-judgment trade-offs between features and speed-to-market.

Leading teams in a remote development group requires a high degree of autonomy and provides a wide range of opportunities to influence the productivity and morale of the teams located here. Attitude and work ethic is a key part of success in this role: you’ll be expected to wear many hats, work fast and smart, and adapt and iterate quickly. A working knowledge of, and experience with, one or more development methodologies is essential.
This position has a high level of visibility so you will need to be a strong leader, and be able to communicate clearly and compellingly at all levels of the company.

Key Responsibilities:

Delivery of quality solutions on-time and in-budget
Management of departmental resources, staffing, and enhancing and maintaining a best-of-class engineering team
Evolution of the software engineering practice within the organization, including better reporting, tools, and evolution of development methodology
Continue to build an effective development organization by driving the recruiting and hiring of senior level engineers, developing and managing the group, and conducting performance reviews of team members
Create and execute appropriate quality plans, project plans, test strategies and processes for development activities in concert with business and project management efforts.
Identify, define and drive long term product strategy

Professional traits that are not unique to this position, but are necessary for Amazon leaders:

Exhibits excellent judgment
Hires and develops great people.
Has relentlessly high standards (is never satisfied with the status quo)
Is able to dive deep and is never out of touch with the details of the business
Expects and requires innovation of her/his team
Has passion and convictions and the innate ability to inspire passion in others
Strong results orientation
Thinks big


Amazon.com offers a demanding, exciting and rewarding experience, with opportunities to work with the world’s best computer scientists on some of the most interesting problems.

Basic Qualifications

BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent
5+ years of experience in a technical role in the industry
4+ years of management experience
Programming experience in Java, C and/or C++ in Linux or Windows environments

Preferred Qualifications
Experience building scalable infrastructure software for commercial online services